Monthly Archives: February 2016

Here’s a link to a radio interview with the writer Joe R. Lansdale, who’s another writer I’m a big fan of, especially his Hap and Leonard series. He’s published more than 40 novels and 30 short stories and in the interview he talks about his new Hap and Leonard thriller as well as his early life and how he became a writer.

Like thousands of others, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of winter – ‘The Winds of Winter’ that is, the next installment of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series. It looks like it’s going to be a bit of a wait though – 2017 at the earliest. I wish Mr Martin all the best with it. I’d much rather he took his time and got it right, than rush it to meet a deadline and not be 100% happy with the result. In the meantime we can just wait and wonder what will happen next.

I loved this book! I thought it was one of the best things I read last year. How Andy Weir wrote it and then got a publishing deal is an interesting story in itself. Anyway, the book… great idea, great main character, great voice, great geeky science aspect – just fantastic. I couldn’t put it down. I recommended it to anyone who asked me for a title to read. I held off seeing the film, as I knew the usual thing would occur, where the film’s not quite as good as the book. I saw it eventually and it was a good film, though for me the book was still better. You get a much better understanding of the character and what he’s going through and all the science is more fully explained so you get exactly what’s going on.

So, I’m waiting to find out what the verdict is. I submitted the seventh draft of my first novel to the editor at my literary agency at the beginning of this week. Once she’s had a chance to go through it, she’ll let me know if it requires any more work. The feedback I had on the previous draft was very positive overall and I had just over three pages of notes to work through, to clarify certain issues and make some small changes. Hopefully, I managed all of them OK and if there is any more to do, it won’t be too much. All I can do now is wait …

I’m a huge fan of the Parker novels and this is the one I’ve read most recently. For those who don’t know, Parker is a professional thief, and one who’s very good at what he does. The writing style is lean and mean and a lot happens in the stories. I’m working my way through the whole series in order, though I tend to read other things in between, so I can stretch them out a bit, as there are only so many. I discovered the novels after seeing the movie ‘Payback’ with Mel Gibson, which is one of my favourite films. I knew it was based on the movie ‘Point Blank’ which was based on the novel of the Continue reading →